SHELLS! Shells! In the name of the Prophet, shells! Shells for Britain and Belgium, for France and Russia and Italy, for Serbia and Roumania! Shells, shells, and ever more shells! It is a cry with which we are familiar now, terribly familiar. We remember—though events crowd on so fast that we forget much—how a year or two ago it was yet more terrible, for it was a cry unanswered and unanswerable.

Our little army—so little, but so great in heart—“our dauntless army, scattered and so small,” sans machine-guns, sans howitzers, sans shells, sans masks, sans everything, still snatched for us, if not victory, yet time, time for everything. To-day it has grown from hundreds to thousands, and thousands to millions, and its munitions have grown faster still. What were Mr. Montagu’s figures the other day? They were incredible. Britain’s output of “heavy shell” has been multiplied ninety-four, wellnigh one hundred, times. The tale of shells it took a whole weary year to make in 1914 can now be made in four days!

How has it been brought about? Largely by the enthusiasm, the faith and fire, of one man and many women,—by Mr. Lloyd George and the workers who have rallied to his call.

This picture show’s the process. It is a picture truly striking, graphic, beautiful, gladdening yet saddening.

These countless, shapely, well-knit figures bending over their task eagerly, earnestly; the power-bands revolving, the lathes turning unceasingly, the tools biting, polishing, finishing; creation in full swing!

All the rare gifts of womanhood are here, but how strangely used! What a pathetic paradox! It is women’s privilege to be the mothers, the nurses, the ministers, the angels of life. But these are mothers and angels of death. They know what they are doing. It is for their men, their babes, their honor, they transform themselves. All the woman’s love and passion, her enthusiasm, her neat and delicate hand, her docility are here, making, moulding these shining shells, multitudinous as their namesakes of the ocean; and like them each is fashioned nicely to pattern, voluted, enamelled, burnished, with their strange knobs and grooves the product of long evolution, exact and right, and then stacked gross by gross, and thousand by thousand, canned earthquakes, bottled death, to be broken and to break to-morrow in the storms and on the ridges of war.

Dux femina facti! What work to-day is not woman’s?

Shells, shells, ever more shells!

HERBERT WARREN.